#foundersfriday: Urgent.ly and Porsche
Imagine it’s Friday evening. After a busy week, the weekend has finally arrived. You’re on the road with your spouse, partner or best friend, excited about the city trip you’ve planned for the next two days. Suddenly, your car breaks down. In the middle of nowhere. What now?
With almost 1.3 billion cars on the streets, approximately 400 million roadside events happen every year across the globe. As the number of vehicles is projected to double by 2040, the roadside events will rise, too. That makes roadside assistance a critical topic for drivers as well as service providers and car manufacturers. And it massively impacts customers satisfaction. To date, getting help in such situations often involves the painful search for a local service provider with 24-hour service, spending a lot of time on the phone and a seemingly endless wait — never quite knowing when the urgently needed help will arrive.
The US-based startup Urgent.ly uses innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers in North America, Europe and Asia in these critical situations. The platform connects drivers, service providers and automotive manufacturers in real time to coordinate the best and fastest help in the event of a breakdown. The startup’s mission is to reinvent roadside assistance.
Urgent.ly just closed a financing round of 18.5 million Euros, with Porsche among the investors. The sports car manufacturer seeks strategic investments in business models related to customer experience, mobility and digital lifestyle.
Why Urgent.ly?
“Urgent.ly is an innovative platform solution which impresses with its speed and transparency. It is also internationally scalable,” says Kilian Sauerwald, Director Aftersales Region and Market Development at Porsche. “The team at Urgent.ly sets itself apart due to its well founded expertise within the customer and technology business. This is why we chose a strategic investment.”
By connecting all relevant parties and combining technologies like geo-location, real-time data, machine-to-machine communication and AI, Urgent.ly provides customers with maximum transparency: from the very beginning, they know exactly where the roadside assistance provider is located and when help will arrive.
This way, the platform reduces the response time of service providers by 50 percent. In the US, more than half of all roadside assistance providers are already connected to the platform, which serves around 45,000 networked vehicles.
